Bill Pronzini - The Crimes of Jordan Wise

She was disappointed, but she understood. When I reminded her that she could pursue her interest in fashion design from anywhere in the world, we moved on to other choices. Bali was one, Tahiti another. I liked those better, but they seemed too remote to Annalise. We both dismissed Hawaii. Too close to San Francisco, too many mainland tourists. And I still remembered how little I'd enjoyed the vacation trip to Maui.

The Caribbean, the Virgin Islands had been my selection all along. They had all the tropical lures of sun and sea and laid-back lifestyle, they were a long way from California and drew relatively few visitors from the West Coast, they'd been U.S. possessions since the 1917 purchase from Denmark, and they were inhabited by English-speaking natives and a large percentage of American expats.

Annalise was dubious at first. "I don't know anything about the Virgin Islands," she said. "Aren't they pretty isolated?"

"Not at all. Close to Puerto Rico. Miami, too, for that matter."

"Virgins. Why are they called that?"

"Columbus named them Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Virgenes on his second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493. In honor of Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins, and because there are thousands of islands in the region."

"Who were all those women?"

"A fourth-century British princess and her sisterhood of maidens. All allegedly raped and massacred in Cologne by marauding Huns."

"Lovely."

"The islands are, yes. Wait until you see the guidebooks."

The Virgins had two other draws for me. One I didn't confide to her because I was afraid it might worry her.

Mixed in with all the positives was an element of risk that held a perverse appeal. The crime of embezzlement as I'd planned mine would violate U.S. banking laws as well as California state laws, and was therefore a federal offense. I would be a federal fugitive; the FBI would come into the case along with state and insurance investigators. If the Plan went off as designed, I had little to fear from any of them. No matter how much manpower went into the investigation, they would have a hell of a time finding me. The perverse appeal lay in the fact that the American Virgins were U.S. federal territory, and that meant the FBI maintained a local branch office there. The prospect of being a federal fugitive living off stolen money in U.S. government territory made me smile every time I thought about it.

The other draw of the Virgin Islands for me I did tell Annalise about. "That part of the Caribbean offers some of the best sailing in the world," I said. "It's the reason a lot of people move there and vacation there."

"Sailing?" she said.

"I've always wanted to own a boat, learn how to sail."

"You never told me that before."

"Just a dream until now."

"Well, I don't know, Jordan—"

"Richard." I'd asked her to call me by that name on these weekend getaways. The sooner it became second nature to her, the less likely she would slip up later on.

"Yes, right—Richard. Somehow I just can't see you in a yachting cap at the wheel of a sailboat."

"Helm," I said.

"What?"

"At the helm of a sailboat. I can see myself there, maybe not in a yachting cap but on my own boat. A schooner, maybe even a ketch or yawl. All I have to do is close my eyes."

"Well, I don't much care for boats," she said. "The one time I went out on one, on the Bay, I got seasick."

"The Bay waters tend to be choppy. That's not usually the case in the Caribbean. There's a lot of shoal water down there."

"What's shoal water?"

"Shallow water. Calm and placid. Everybody's a good sailor in the Virgins, they say."

"I'll take your word for it. Personally I prefer dry land."

"You won't feel that way once we get there."

Later, on another of our weekend getaways, I bought her a Virgin Islands guidebook and a coffee-table book of photographs of the U.S. and British Virgins. Annalise's enthusiasm for the region increased when she read through them. Subtropical climate with temperatures that seldom varied from the average of 79 to 88 degrees in the summer and 72 to 82 degrees in the winter, and an annual rainfall of only 27 inches. Sun worshipper's paradise: white-sand beaches, coral reefs, deserted palm-fringed cays, placid waters in ever-changing shades of blue and green. Plus stately homes and old forts and ancient pirate strongholds. Nobody with an imagination and a yen for adventure and excitement could resist this part of the world.

The weekend after Thanksgiving, before the winter snows made driving through the Sierras difficult, we met in South Lake Tahoe and then went down to Carson City together and applied for a marriage license. Annalise Bonner and Richard James Laidlaw were married that afternoon by a justice of the peace.

We had a champagne wedding supper at the Ormsby House, then drove back to South Lake Tahoe and bought another bottle and consummated the union. Afterward we lay in bed and drank champagne and toasted the future.

"How do you like being married?" I asked her.

"So far, it's terrific," she said. "But my God—Annalise Bonner Laidlaw. It doesn't roll trippingly off the tongue, does it?"

"I like it," I said. "It has class. An East Coast, old-money, finishing-school kind of name."

"You think so?"

"Absolutely. Mine's not bad either."

"Well. . . maybe."

I smiled. "Laidlaw is perfect, in fact. I couldn't have found a better surname."

"How do you figure that?"

"Exactly what we're doing, isn't it? Laying the law?"

She burst out laughing. So did I. We laughed so hard she got the hiccups and spilled champagne on my belly. She leaned down and began to lick it off, laughing and hiccuping the whole time, and that led to a second round of lovemaking—"laying each other like we're laying the law," she said, which started us giggling and her hiccuping again right in the middle of it.

I think that weekend may have been our happiest time together. I know it was for me.

We spent Christmas together at a small out-of-the-way inn on the Mendocino coast. I gave her a $300 pair of gold earrings, heart-shaped, with pendants of amethyst—her birthstone. Her presents to me were a yachting cap, not the fancy commodore type with gold braid but a functional Gill sailing hat, and books on sailing for beginners and on cruising the Virgin Islands and Lesser Antilles.

New Year's Eve we spent apart, by mutual agreement, to maintain the pretense that we were actively dating others. She accepted an invitation to a party from one of the men she'd been seeing. As for me, there was a plain, friendly secretary in Amthor's design department, whose smiles in my direction I'd interpreted as wistful little signals that she was interested and available. I seem to remember that her name was Joan, but it could have been Jane or Jean. I'd been invited to a party by the newly married Jim Sanderson, and in turn I invited the secretary. We danced, drank champagne, kissed and sang "Auld Lang Syne" to ring in the new year. And every time I looked at her I saw Annalise, only Annalise.

I dated Joan or Jane or Jean four more times over a period of seven weeks. On the last of these she made it plain that I was welcome to stay the night at her apartment, but I couldn't have had sex with her if my life depended on it. I tried to let her down easy—she was a nice person and pleasant enough company—and she took the rejection well enough, but I could tell that she was hurt by it. Alone in the world, hungry for affection . . . a female version of the old Jordan Wise. That Jordan Wise might have learned to care for Joan or Jane or Jean, allowed a relationship to develop. Not the reborn version. Not the faithful and committed married man, Richard Laidlaw.

Establishing a new identity requires more than just paperwork and the altering of a few physical characteristics. You can't simply pretend to be somebody new and different. You have to shed your old personality in layers, the way some snakes shed their skin. Learn how to wear your new one. Change the way you think as well as the way you walk, talk, act in public.